URBAN TACTICS

URBAN TACTICS; Requiem for a Much-Beloved School

By ALEX MINDLIN

Published: July 4, 2004

KAROLYN BELCHER, the forceful young principal of the John A. Reisenbach Charter School, sat in her office on a recent Thursday, sniffling slightly.

''I think I'm officially bitter,'' she said with a catch in her voice as she worked her way through a pile of red eighth-grade diplomas, flipping each one over, signing it, and laying it on a second stack. ''It's hard to see five years come to this. At least the kids are graduating.''

These eighth graders are the last class at Reisenbach, a charter school on West 117th Street in Harlem that Ms. Belcher has guided since its founding in 1999. Charter schools, state-financed, privately run alternatives to traditional public schools, have unusual freedom to operate, but they must submit to periodic and grueling review. In New York, the toughest review comes every five years, when a state evaluator, in this case the State University of New York Board of Trustees, must decide whether to renew the school charter.

Last February, the board decided not to do so for Reisenbach, influenced in part by low test scores its students received in 2003. Two weeks ago, amid calls for a reprieve based on new, higher scores, and after a nerve-racking period of flux, the board affirmed its earlier decision.

Right or wrong, the ruling has been received with anger and incredulity in this close-knit community.

The parents and teachers at Reisenbach, which had about 430 students, say their school is more than a set of scores. Typical of Reisenbach, they say, is the tableau that formed on a recent afternoon in the brightly painted lobby, where a handful of parents of kindergartners sat on a bench, chatting amiably as they waited for their offspring to be dismissed.

The parents, who had arrived an hour early, were presumably there as much for the kibitzing as for their children. One woman had brought her 6-day-old infant, which prompted a lot of cooing and a round of stories about childbirth. A father recounted bringing his wife ice cubes as she lay in labor, and getting caught skimming off the top.

Beverly Patoir, a brisk young mother who had helped lead the effort to keep the school open, asked if everyone had signed the thank-you card for City Councilwoman Eva Moskowitz, the school's staunchest political ally. Ms. Moskowitz is pregnant with her second child, so this was a new-baby card as well. ''Everybody's pregnant this year,'' Ms. Patoir said. ''We're going to have a P.T.A. meeting-slash-baby shower.''

Parents at a charter school like Reisenbach tend to be deeply involved in their children's education, which is why they removed them from the public system in the first place. They are also reliable supporters of their children's schools -- perhaps too reliable, experts say.

''You can't take parent support as objectively as you'd like,'' said Jeanne Allen, president of the Center for Education Reform, a research organization in Washington that favors charter schools.

This intense parental loyalty makes closing charter schools very difficult. ''There's a huge sympathy factor to parents who look you in the eye and say, 'My child loves this school, and I'm not sending them away,''' said Peter Murphy, formerly a vice president of the Charter Schools Institute, an expert body that advises the SUNY board. ''It grips your soul. Nobody wants to tell these parents, 'Sorry, we've got to go by the book here.''' But, he added: ''What are charters supposed to be about? They're supposed to be about unemotional issues.''

By ''unemotional issues,'' Mr. Murphy means measurable indices of a school's performance: how well its curriculum is designed, whether there are provisions for self-review and -- most important -- how the students test. The Charter Schools Institute found Reisenbach had fallen short in all of these respects.

THE parents point out that Reisenbach's third and fourth graders equaled or outdid the surrounding school district in math and English this year. What is more, they add, simple observation tells them that their children have thrived there.

On the last Thursday of the school year, a Reisenbach mother named Cynthia, who did not want her full name used, sat on a shady bench in Morningside Park, keeping an eye on the second graders, her son Joseph among them, who tore about the park on their year-end field trip. She sent Joseph to a Catholic school last year, but found that he simply couldn't keep up.

''The teachers that were there -- if the kids were up to par, they were with those kids,'' she said. ''If not, they would lose interest. He kind of gave up. In the mornings, he would get up, and he'd say, 'I don't want to go to school.' He hasn't said that this whole year.''

The next day, Tracy Rebe, a 25-year-old science teacher, was among the 28 teachers who said their final goodbyes to the children. Most Reisenbach students will return to their local public schools next year.

''It's a school that really cares about the kids,'' Ms. Rebe said, ''and it's the whole kid we're talking about; we're not just talking about numbers. It's also, 'Let's keep taking them on trips; let's keep giving them experiences.'''

Ms. Rebe used to teach in a public middle school in Baltimore, where, as she remembers it, ''our meetings used to be a lot of complaining about why the school wasn't working.'' At her first teachers' meeting at Reisenbach, she thought to herself, ''Here I'm in an environment where it's all about the kids.''

At the Baltimore school, students had not been allowed to come back to visit after graduating. ''That would never happen here,'' Ms. Rebe said. ''Unfortunately, they're not going to have a place to come back to.''

On June 25, the last day of class, a scrubbed young first-grade teacher asked her students how they felt. ''I'm sad because the school is closing,'' one child said. Another added, ''I'm sad because I'm never gonna come here again.'' In the next classroom over, Alison Popp, 24, had to step into the hallway and cry a little. One of her first graders, she said, arrived that morning ''very upset.'' ''He said, 'I don't want the school to be knocked down.' I said, 'It's not going to be knocked down.' I think the image they have is of a bulldozer.''

''It's hard for me,'' she added, her voice hoarse. ''I won't ever know how they're adjusting to the second grade.''

Pradeline Bonnet, a parent who had accompanied her daughter to the field trip to Morningside Park, sounded equally frustrated. ''Why the state want to close it?'' she asked. ''We can't never have nothing good for our kids?''

Photos: THE SHORT GOODBYE -- Tears and mortarboards marked the final days at the John A. Reisenbach Charter School, which closed not just for summer, but for good. (Photographs by Angel Franco/The New York Times)